On “Cairns (When Your Heart Belongs to Everyone),” he sulks about the pressures of being a public figure with a series of increasingly strained comparisons: “a flower shop in June,” “footprints on the moon,” “a corner store that’s out of booze.” “Shakespeare in a Nutshell” is perhaps the worst offender, a muted electric piano backing Oberst as he mopes, “I have no one to depend on, Gentile or Jew.” It’s not just that his couplets beget eye rolls, but that they feel like retrodden territory without any new insights, moving backwards on his board game of life without any nuance or self-reflection to show for it.

This lethargy becomes pointedly obvious on their cover of Lucinda Williams’ “Sharp Cutting Wings (Song to a Poet).” On his warbling lips and somberly plucked guitar, the song loses the ambiguity in Williams’ rendition, the way her voice could express polarized emotions—doubt and hope, affection and suspicion—within a single word. Only when folk vocalist Leslie Stevens joins him does the song begin to recapture the resigned warmth of the original. 

Similarly, the album’s strengths often come from incorporating the voice of another: On two songs across the EP, Oberst recruits tourmate Alynda Segarra (of Hurray for the Riff Raff), who provides some much-needed muscle to contrast his half-hearted melodies. As they sing “Blasting off to outer space/Small step in a big rat race” on the title track’s final refrain, Oberst’s gravely low-end finds a harmony with Segarra’s fiery vocals, and the album finds its footing. On “Dyslexic Palindrome,” Segarra takes the lead, their disquieting vibrato building the necessary tension that Oberst’s meek “Wow!” fails to reach.

When they break free from the tired motions of routine melancholy, Bright Eyes manage to rekindle their strange groove. The album’s unexpectedly ska single, “1st World Blues,” shakes off the languorous pace of the album’s opening songs with an uptempo beat, a horn section, and a disaffected, no-bullshit speak-talk cadence from Oberst. It strangely works; like his work in Desaparacidos, his most memorable lyrics as of late directly tackle the material, political realities that inform his and his fans’ bleak outlooks. “You’re just a tool that’s never gonna get used,” he sneers, emboldened and aggressive in the face of capitalist alienation.